Twitch is well respected in the gaming and tech community. Those that have stayed post acquisition, they have benefited from the rising Amazon stock. Moreover, the office is in the heart of the city, offers free catered food, and best of all, a free massage once a month though they are cutting it.

Cons

Notice all the 5's and most of them were from a few years ago with more recent reviews being in the 1-3 star area. This is because while things were great prior to the acquisition and shortly there afterwards, things have gotten bad very quickly here. Morale is very low. Despite an email to all employees (in which the f word was used) to address critical feedback on communication, career development, culture as well as a session on vision, the core remains unresolved and rotten. Mostly, as the company just chases metrics to please the Amazon overloads, Twitch does not provide employee with sufficient tools to do their job (and not just laptops and cables but core internal tools to manage the site), and moreover often reorganizes them every 2-3 months. Most of the time it comes from new outside hires just a level below the executive level, many of which are not vetted for their management or leadership skills or interviewed by those that will be directly impacted. New Business Leaders are being hired left and right, and some of them just step on other teams or have unhappy teams in less than a month. Others of them are poor managers and worse off, have fired or pushed out their direct reports for things they should have been responsible for while they get promoted. While these new business leaders come in, there have not been many instances for existing employees to be promoted beyond a L5 to L6, let alone a L6 to L7 and often they just get reorged under these business leaders. Finally, while half the time the company behaves like Twitch Chat, the other half of the time it is scrambling with poor data infrastructure and reporting support to complete weekly, monthly, annual reports, leaving little time to take care of customers or do work.

CEO's ineptitude has trickled down to every level of the organization. Twitch's future is incredibly grim.

Zero growth or advancement opportunities. Don't expect to see any meaningful increases to your salary.

Twitch treats its pre-acquisition employees like royalty, granting unqualified individuals Director-level status despite being woefully inexperienced. If you're a new hire, you can be assured that you'll be more competent than your boss and likely his/her boss too.

Culture is downright toxic. Get ready to relive your high school years with cliques abound.

HR has watched the company wither over the last year or so and taken no substantive actions to address the *overwhelming* discontent among employees. Further, HR would rather criticize employees for providing feedback than listen to what is being said.

Product has become an absolute mess. Emmett and his cronies have lost sight of what users and creators want from a video platform. Expect lots of late nights and lost productivity building and shipping features that nobody wants only to pivot a few months later.

Advice to Management

File an unemployment insurance claim.

Either you get fired or you take Twitch down with you and you're still left without a job.

-Great coworkers on most engineering teams-Great name recognition. Hearing from creators is always uplifting.

Cons

-No product vision whatsoever. Teams just build whatever Emmett says to build that week, before abandoning it once he forgets he said he wanted it. Emmett has the classic new CEO quirk of being easily swayed by the last enthusiastic person who speaks to him, so most product decisions depend entirely on how much he likes the person pitching it.-No clear communication of successes or failures. If a chart doesn't go up and to the right, no one talks about it. There is never anything to learn from failure.-Product reviews often involve Emmett literally screaming at employees. No joke.-The Seattle teams are all Amazon. It's a bit spooky to see the mothership starting to take over internal Twitch teams.-Our People/HR team is wholly incompetent. Not sure if this is because they don't know how to do their jobs, or if they're just a mouthpiece for Amazon HR. Either way, they're under serving Twitch to the extreme. This is most evident in the absolute lack of career development or planning. No one knows how to get to the next level. We actually skipped a review cycle for no apparent reason while they sat on their hands, so there's even less clarity on promotion/firing.

Advice to Management

Emmett, focus on building a company. You're never going to be able to mobilize against FB and Youtube if no one at the company trusts or respects your product decisions.

Free food, good comp (for new employees), and a fun product. Good opportunity for junior employees to get hands-on experience with AWS.

Cons

The two main issues were the distributed development environment and inexperienced leadership. The leadership did not set clear goals for teams, which resulted in a lack of coordination across different verticals. The distributed approach to development without clear goals caused issues with quality control, thrashing, and improper team scaling. It also meant a lack of central tooling, where multiple teams were recreating solutions for the same problems.

On the management side, the senior leadership did not communicate well, had trouble delegating, and did not provide cover for employees. The main way that exec communicated with the company was through all-hands meetings, which means that things are not written down and on the record. Some of the exec team also gets too involved in details rather than delegating tasks to their teams, even though there's been a focus on being in more experienced managers. There were also cases where employees got burned by the CEO and their managers did not provide cover.

Advice to Management

Provide more written communication to employees and loop in more of the company when decisions have been made. Delegate tasks rather than getting lost in the weeds. Own up to your employee's mistakes.Promote from within rather than bringing in external candidates with similar amounts of experience at a higher level.

Thanks for taking the time to provide us with your feedback. We strive to find the best qualified candidates for every open position externally and internally. We have a new internal transfer process - we know that as we grow and scale more opportunities become available internally to Twitch employees. Appreciate your advice, please feel free to come speak with me directly or please see your HR business partner.

Executive team consistently makes bad calls on product, and does not let IC employees do their jobs. Product Managers design almost exclusively around the pet ideas of our CEO, rather than our users, and this is highly encouraged by our executive team. ("Emmett said we had to build X.") Executives who have continually made big bets that have failed miserably are rewarded with larger teams and more power and influence.

We very badly need to hire more experienced executives that aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. This includes an honest evaluation of the skills and effectiveness of our current senior management. I understand those currently in power were in the trenches together building the company, and that they have a history, but turning a blind eye to the inefficiencies, skill gaps, and performance management problems that are rampant throughout the company is hurting everyone. In some instances, the roles have grown beyond the skills of those who hold them. Acknowledging this and gracefully addressing these issues would be a much better outcome than hoping that senior leadership can slowly gain the needed skills through trial and error or osmosis.

The next two quarters may be riddled with departures if more aggressive measures aren't taken to address our lack of autonomy and product direction.

Promotions are almost non-existent and "pay increases" consist of hoping and praying that AMZN stock increases in value.

Advice to Management

Do the painful but necessary thing of bringing in more experienced leadership, even if that means that some of the old-timers lose some of their power and influence. Competitors are closing in and we can't afford to keep spinning our wheels on poorly executed ideas that are not helping us grow and expand our position as the market leader.

Benefits, while they still last, like massages and snacksare pretty goodSome good people are still aroundCompensation being tied to amazon stockKudos to recruiting/hr for posting 5 star reviews on a regular basis to keep the Glassdoor rating afloat

Cons

Twitch used to be a great company to work at. Too bad the CEO and the executive team has turned a great company into a dumpster fire.

There is no long term vision for twitch. The executive team just care about hitting their numbers, on this meaningless metric called "minutes watched" that doesn't actually mean anything, can be be easily gamed, and doesn't drive value. They're so desperate to hit their goals that they've resorted to shady accounting of minutes. Every single month half of the company gets sucked into these mbrs and wbrs, and while they're good concepts, the goal for these at twitch isn't to actually report what happened, but to write a narrative that changes every single month to pretend we are actually doing great while in reality most things are terrible. This way amazon can be confused while the execs inch their way another month closer to their next vest.

Zero product vision. Micro-managing CEO. Zero long term thinking or strategy. PMs can't establish their own vision for products, instead they become mere puppets for the CEO, who is far too deep into the weeds. Wish he would give the PMs the freedom to decide the color of a button and instead focusing on actual important things. Incompetent executive team (70% should be fired given the performance of their orgs). Ineffective communication due to the changing requests every week/month. Good people leaving left and right. How this company is still being run this way for this long is beyond me, but I expect significant changes soon.

Advice to Management

If you can't do the job, let someone else do it, rather than ruining the lives of everyone around you and the whole company. If all of the products coming out of your org is a complete failure, you should be fired, not own more stuff because of some kindergarten friendship. If you are terrible at hiring and leading people, you probably shouldn't be a VP of anything. If you keep having to fire people in your org, including those you hired yourself, because of one issue or another, maybe you are part of the problem. If you don't have a company strategy, why is there even a chief strategy officer?

There are plenty of people who are both experienced and willing to step up to steer the ship in the right direction. Do us all a favor and get out of the way. I'm sure you've already conned enough money from amazon to not have to work.

It's become abundantly clear that the company operates off of the whims of the Emmett. Only his pet projects and initiatives see the light of day and he has little to no interest in personal growth, career development, or maturing of Twitch the company. Twitch's refusal to formalize a CTO has grown past disfunction.

Work super hard and never be appreciated because what you're working on isn't Emmett's idea.

Teams are hemorrhaging people, yet people prefer to chalk it up to "just a few disgruntled employees" rather than attempting to fix the problem. Recruiting even tells people to go and try to drown out the bad glassdoor reviews with good ones. Nice joke.

It is now impossible to recommend anyone to work here; I've advised friends/family to stay away. Go where you might be appreciated; go where you have a career path.

Any accolades that could have been laid on Twitch are now gone. Even the perks are no longer a selling point.

Advice to Management

Exec needs to be let go. We need doers not cheerleaders. Start over, or don't. Doubt most people will stay around long enough anyway.